I was thinking that Conway's game of Life could be used as a "toy" 2d analog that describes the computational model for people unfamiliar with such models, and it could be far simpler and shorter than the existing material going from hypergraphs to causal graphs to multiway systems.
The point would be the following:
- The Game of Life is generated by a simple rule
- Inside the screen - objects like "blinkers" could be identified as clocks, and "gliders" as particles - but there is nothing inside the model or code that expresses those objects explictly
- a set of "frames" mapping the screen contents at step "t" could be described as the time evolution of a wave equation to an abstract "hilbert space". Each frame could be converted to waves using a superposition of fourier transforms on the frame contents at step "t". This would be an analog to QFT
Now - this model isn't 3d, or multi-way branching - yet it is quite analogous to the concepts expressed in the Wolfram Model - only very simple, and very visual....There is almost no code, and lots of complex behavior.
Is using the 2d Game of Life as a toy analog for the purpose of explanation to others a useful idea?